Emancipation

“Reform and opening” started from the top with the seminal leadership transition from Mao to Deng. Deng Xiaoping heralded China’s boom in late 1978 when he called for experiments with “economic democracy” and “emancipation” from orthodox ideas. But the boom was not simply a top-down, state-orchestrated phenomenon. In fact, the biggest contribution of the state, especially in the first phase of growth, was to get out of the way. Farmers were liberated from collectives, sparking a wildfire of capitalism in the countryside. Urban markets and industry were freed to “grow out of the plan,” making profits on surplus production and creating powerful incentives for rapid growth.

The Birth of Private Workers, The Death of People’s Communes

One Child Policy Stimulated Growth

People Who Fall Behind Will Be Beaten

Deng Understood That the World Had Changed

Susan Shirk

Professor of Political Science

Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of political science. Shirk first traveled to China in 1971 and has been doing research there ever since. During 1997-2000, Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia. She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia and the Koreas. Shirk served as a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, the Board of Governors for the East-West Center (Hawaii), the Board of Trustees of the U.S.-Japan Foundation, and the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an emeritus member of the Aspen Strategy Group. As Senior Adviser to The Albright Group, Shirk advises private sector clients on China and East Asia.

So, the puzzle to me was, if they’re appointed by the central party, why are they so important? Why did Mao and Deng Xiaoping play to the provinces and try to get their support for these new initiatives? You know, whenever they were trying to do something really ambitious, really different, to change the status quo, why did they play to the provinces? And, so I started trying to open up the black box of power relations within the Communist Party. And what I realized was, that the Central Committee -- in the Communist Party, you’ve got the Central Committee, which is about 200 people, then you’ve got the Politburo and the Standing Committee of the Politburo -- has the authority to elect the Politburo and the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Now, it’s true that the nominations come from the guys at the top, and more or less they just ratify it, but according to the Party constitution, they have the power to select the Standing Committee of the Politburo and the Politburo. So, I started speculating that maybe those guys at the top really do have to anticipate the reactions and the preferences of those people. And if they do it successfully, then you never see them overruling. And it’s interesting because, in the Soviet Union, there are a couple of instances in which the Central Committee did overrule the nominations. So, they have the same formal political system, but what’s interesting is who’s in the Central Committee. The Central Committee consists of three main blocs: The central, government and party officials. So, it’s not a full-time job, being a Central Committee member. You’re a Minister of the Education Ministry, or the Chemical Ministry, but you’re also a Central Committee member. So, central officials, provincial officials, the Party Secretary and the Governor, pretty much of every province, is in the Central Committee, and it’s one of the largest blocs. And then the third one is military officers. So, the army, local officials, central officials. And I saw some evidence, although I really wasn’t able to pin this down systemically, and people have now been trying to do research on this, that during that period when they were trying to build support and play to the provinces, the proportion of provincial leaders in the Central Committee grew. So, they bolstered it, they played it out. The other thing they did is to make a lot of decisions in national work conferences, which were, in effect, the Central Committee, augmented by even more provincial officials. So, they tried to find decision-making arenas where provincial officials had a strong voice. So I have a model of the Chinese political institutions, which may or may not be right, but at least I’ve got a model, whereas most people just don’t even try. So, I give myself a little credit for that. So, my model is something called “reciprocal accountability.” The top party leaders appoint all the officials and the military officers, who are in the Central Committee, so that’s top-down, but those guys also have the authority to choose the top leaders. So, the lines of authority run both ways. And what that means is that when the top leaders in the Standing Committee of the Politburo, or Deng Xiaoping, who of course was doing this informally, not in the Standing Committee actually, in order to get the support for their initiatives, try to make sure that those three big groups are satisfied, that they’re getting things that they want. And in the case of the economic reform, I think the key group was the provincial officials, and playing to the provinces was the core political strategy of China’s economic reforms. The market reforms were introduced, first of all, selectively, as experiments. So, you would give Fuzhen and Guangdong Special Economic Zones. The experiments in allowing firms to retain profits, give them incentive to make more money, instead of delivering everything up, those were also introduced selectively, according to different localities. And then the so-called "experiments" really weren’t experiments, because the reformers at the top lavished all sorts of special treatment on them: tax breaks, you name it. So, of course, they succeeded, and then other areas that may have once been very skeptical of the reforms, because it was a little bit of a threat to their vested interests, thought, “Wow, we want to do this too. This is really a great deal.” And, particularly important, there was the fiscal decentralization that allowed provincial governments to retain a certain share of the revenue produced by the enterprises in their locality. So, I’d say they’re an engine. They create this kind of bandwagon that spreads from one region to another, and primarily from coastal to inland.